European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Monday that the European Union can no longer rely solely on a “rules-based” system to defend itself against modern threats and must assess whether its institutions and processes enhance or undermine its credibility.
“We will always defend and uphold the rules-based system that we helped to build with our allies, but we can no longer rely on it as the only way to defend our interests or assume its rules will shelter us from the complex threats that we face,” von der Leyen said at a conference for EU ambassadors.
She added that the EU urgently needs to reconsider whether its doctrines, institutions, and decision-making—designed in a postwar world of stability and multilateralism—have kept pace with rapid global change. “We must determine whether the system we built, with all of its well-intentioned attempts at consensus and compromise, is more a help or a hindrance to our credibility as a geopolitical actor,” she said.